Monday, February 16, 2015

Fuleen Restaurant, on Division Street in Manhattan Chinatown, is one of the better Chinese seafood
restaurants in New York City, and one of the more enduring restaurants in the Little Fuzhou section of Chinatown east of Bowery. When I first went there a dozen years ago I didn't pay any attention to the name, since Chinese restaurants often have odd names, particularly when not catering to non-Chinese diners. Then about 10 years later I ran into Fuleen Palace in Howard Beach in Queens which serves Americanized Chinese food, and I started to wonder--did this restaurant have a common owner with the one in Manhattan Chinatown? However that theory went down the drain when I started seeing
similar variations, such as Chen Fulin Kwok in Brooklyn Chinatown and Fully Bakery in
Elmhurst. At that point the question of what Fuleen or its variations stood for started to drive me crazy on two different accounts.

Besides these Fuleen restaurants, an internet search then pulled up many, many other
"Fuleen" Restaurants as well
as its phonetic equivalent, "Fulin". There's actually a chain of Chinese restaurants with that name in Tennessee and Alabama. And there are other variations, such as FuLoon, Fullin, and who knows what else. The first strange thing is that the word Fuleen only seems to be associated with
Chinese restaurants in the eastern United States. Mention Fuleen to anybody on the West Coast and you get blank stares. The second factor is the dozens of Fuleen, Fulin, etc. restaurants all seem to have opened quite recently, certainly just in this century.

The fact that all of the Fuleen restaurants are located in the eastern United States does provide a major clue to the origin. As I wrote in my Menuism article on Monday night wedding banquets in Manhattan Chinatown, there is a network of Chinese restaurant owners and workers tethered to the Fujianese community in the eastern part of Manhattan Chinatown. Quite possibly, the name Fuleen and its deriviations is an indication of ownership by Chinese originally from Fujian Province in China, who passed through Manhattan Chinatown and rode the bus network from there to places all over the eastern half of the United States. Since the Fujianese did not make their presence felt in the United States until the 1990s, that would explain the lack of pre-existing use of the Fuleen name. This was a good theory, but was this really the answer?

In search of a solution I asked for thoughts from the participants of the Chowhound message boards.
It turns out that the Chinese name for Fuleen Restaurant 富臨 has no English equivalent, but is a term that connotes wealth and joy. There is nothing particularly Fujianese about the use of the term, but for whatever reason it now appears to have been adopted by Fujianese restaurant owners, much like previously generations of Chinese restaurant owners gave names like Golden Palace or Silver & Gold Amazing to their eateries. While there is no smoking gun confirming this conclusion, given that Fuleen doesn't have a specific technical meaning, it's consistent with the current domination of Fujianese restauranteurs in the east, south and midwest. And at this point there's really no other explanation.

Sunday, February 15, 2015

We live in an area of the Hollywood Hills called The Oaks. It’s a community of over 300 homes, adjacent to Griffith Park, between the observatory and the Hollywood sign. Thanks to a rockslide in Griffith Park some 25 years ago, there is no access to the San Fernando Valley on the other side of the Hollywood sign, so there are no Waze driven commuters going through the community. Brad Pitt has his US compound in the Oaks, and over the decades notables from Will and Ariel Durant to Cary Grant and Randolph Scott’s bachelor mansion to Diane Keaton, Vince Vaughn, Jason Priestly, Flea, Nicolas Cage (before his real estate empire crumbled) and Adam Levine have rotated in and out of the neighborhood.

There are two main entrances to the Oaks, the Fern Dell Griffith Park entrance on Los Feliz Blvd., and Bronson Ave. at Franklin Ave. on the western end. While there are other streets which could be theoretically used for access to the Oaks, only the two main entrances have traffic signals, and without a traffic signal it’s nearly impossible to cross Franklin Ave. Recently the Bronson Ave. entrance has seen extreme traffic delays at times, leading to a community outcry for amelioration. I’m guessing that the increase in traffic might be from cars using Bronson Ave. as an access route to the Hollywood sign, which despite traffic signs to the contrary, can be reached by turning up Hollyridge Dr., and which GPS toting tourists have finally discovered. That and all the hipsters hanging out at the Oaks Gourmet, jammed whether it's 10:30 am or 2 pm (don't those people have jobs?), plus Gelsons and the Scientology Center at the same intersection.

The neighborhood and city councilman Tom La Bonge came up with a perfect solution–install a traffic signal at Van Ness Ave and Franklin Ave. to provide a third entry point. Besides relieving pressure on Bronson Ave., Van Ness Ave. ends right at Hollywood freeway onramp, which would give Oaks residents a straight shot onto the freeway. Congratulations were in order, and all that was needed was approval by the Los Angeles City Traffic Department. So guess what? The Traffic Department turned down the signal request because there wasn’t enough traffic to justify the signal--nobody was crossing Franklin Ave. on Van Ness. Well d’oh. Of course not. Because without a signal you’d wait forever to cross Franklin at Van Ness, so few drivers are stupid enough to take that route. But government is too stupid to figure that out.